What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Oizen]

It was totally genocide.
Hydaelyn literally killed all of her people to make weaker more frail people, and then became the god of those people.

The funny part is the Zodiark plan seems to have fucking worked because it wasn't until we killed Zodarik that Metion started to attack Etheirys again.
Which means even in an incredibly sealed state, Zodiark was enough to scare Metion away.

Like I get this wasn't the developers intention with the events, and the takeway shouldn't be that Hydaelyn is an insane genocidal god, rather EW's story is pretty poorly written.

[Kazhar]

Has one side convinced the other yet? No? Keep trying lovers/haters of the story. One day you just might convince the other side.

Well, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both

[DiaDeem]

It was totally genocide.
Hydaelyn literally killed all of her people to make weaker more frail people, and then became the god of those people.

The funny part is the Zodiark plan seems to have fucking worked because it wasn't until we killed Zodarik that Metion started to attack Etheirys again.
Which means even in an incredibly sealed state, Zodiark was enough to scare Metion away.

Like I get this wasn't the developers intention with the events, and the takeway shouldn't be that Hydaelyn is an insane genocidal god, rather EW's story is pretty poorly written.

I mean... they killed half the population to create Zodiark, then the half of the half to nurture life again, and then they were gonna kill EVERYONE new to bring back the old.

The whole takeaway for me was that these people (the ancients, all of them), as powerful as they were, they were as human and as flawed as anyone else. It's always been the most interesting thing about the Ancients for me. They're all different shades of Gray, Venat included.

Anyway.. just wanted to make a small comment. This discussion is a bit beyond my interest anymore.

[Kazhar]

I mean... they killed half the population to create Zodiark, then the half of the half to nurture life again, and then they were gonna kill EVERYONE new to bring back the old.

Is it really "killed half the population" when they did it in their own volition? You could say they were coerced into sacrificing themselves but nothing indicates this was true.
Also, no, they weren't going to kill everyone to bring back the old. The wording in never ambiguous about that, it's always "some of the new life created".

You're probably mistaking it with the Rejoinings, where the Ascians had the intention of killing all the Sundered in the end, but they were far gone at this point.

The whole takeaway for me was that these people (the ancients, all of them), as powerful as they were, they were as human and as flawed as anyone else. It's always been the most interesting thing about the Ancients for me. They're all different shades of Gray, Venat included.

This, I can agree. The Ancients were flawed and not perfect, what annoys me is that they're judged on completely different standards for their mistakes than the Sundered or our own mankind.
Hermes apparently didn't receive the amount of mental health care he needed? "Wow their society were a bunch of evil unfeeling fascists who deserved to die".
They had to make difficult choices to ensure the star would survive? "Their kind was doomed, it doesn't matter if Venat killed them."
Try to apply the same logic to humans and see how cruel this would be.

Unfortunately the story itself is guilty of this. Showing more compassion to the horrors done in Allag's name than the Ancients for commiting the crime of... not suffering enough in their daily lives I guess.

[Lauront]

Venat isn't perfect. But with the information she had at the time, and the future she saw through us, she had hope that humanity would be able to find a way to deal with the Meteion problem where the Ancients could not. The Ancients didn't have resilience, how could they? What trials and tribulations did they ever encounter? The Final Days laid one thing bare for them; they couldn't go on unless they could live perfect lives and to live any other way was to live in despair. The sundering at least gave us the opportunity to learn and grow and become resilient over our many lives. Couple that with our newfound ability to interact with dynamis and you end up with a very special group of individuals who are spearheaded by one person who has all the ingredients for a counter to Meteion; thinness of Aether, resilience to despair, and hope for the future.

They clearly had enough to muster enough sacrifices for Zodiark to be summoned in the first place, to save their star, and then again to restore the star. Resilience is also an acquired trait, not just an inherent one. The ancients were shown, in virtually all of their depictions, as a very ascetic, pragmatic people who valued efficiency and the well-being of the star above all else. Though they possessed great inherent power, it came with its own risks (e.g. shown in Venat's side story), and they learnt to manage these. You can imagine many other a species, possessed of such power, ending itself in a crescendo of bloodshed. The notion that, if confronted with the truth of what hit them, they would not adjust as necessary to ensure the survival of their star to me is a rather laughable one. Among the destroyed stars we're shown, they alone turned it around (the dragons had to enact an exodus to survive) - it was the lack of faith of one of their own, thanks to what she was told, that undid them.

But we're not shown Venat providing this information to them. We're shown some scene with some straw ancients prattling on about "perfect paradises" etc., which is not congruent with what we saw detailed about the 3rd sacrifice, i.e. that it was to be undertaken for their brethren, who we now know to be in a limbo of sorts in Zodiark, in order to release them. Meanwhile Venat responds with the equivalent of Hallmark greeting card platitudes about despair that I would not blame anyone in that situation for shrugging off. The arguments shown in Venat's stylised cutscene (and it is indeed stylised as it fits none of the details we know about the 3rd sacrifice), without the context informing them, are not convincing ones and border on tone-deaf. Even in Anamnesis Anyder, Venat (probably because she knows her former colleagues have good reason to doubt what is being said due to the information she's not providing them) refuses to speak ill of the Convocation, noting that they too do what they think is best for the star.

Meanwhile, for all their supposed 'resilience', the sundered are no less susceptible to succumbing to despair, as shown in Thavnair. The Omega sidequest elaborates on this in articulating that there is no single one character trait or attitude that makes one resilient to despair - sometimes even strength of character can result in this, and tentatively attributes this variance to the sundered, dragons and ancients possessing, unlike his species, variety in individual perspectives. In the 8UC we see the Ironworks convinced they had to go back in time to save the WoL (at the potential risk of their own timeline fading) and 'right' the timeline, because they deemed the path of their timeline doomed.

There is an irony in the words as well given that the WoL is in fact one of the most rejoined sundered, being 9/14ths as opposed to the usual 8/14th of the Source and is reliant on a variety of ancient props, such as Azem's crystal, and Emet's fondness and Elidibus's sense of duty, without whom their efforts would've resulted in an absolute failure. Really, barring thinness of aether (which indirect methods could've maybe accomplished, like the Resonance allows Garleans to use magic), the ancients generally and the Convocation specifically exhibited all of the bolded in that quote, and to it I'd add a measure of selflessness.

The Convocation, now tempered, was going to sacrifice the NEW life brought about after restoring the planet in order to attempt to restore those Ancients lost in the first two sacrifices and, after doing battle and attempting and failing to subjugate Zodiark, knowing His tempering would mandate repeated sacrifices in order to sustain Him, Hydaelyn sundered everything.

? This is pants on the head wrong. Never ever was it mentioned that his tempering would be the source of any "mandate" for repeated sacrifices to sustain him. It's not even shown that either Zodiark or Hydaelyn require constant aether like this. In fact, the Q&A contradicts this:

Q: Venat said that not even her soul would remain but what does that mean? I’m very fond of her character and would like to see her again.
A: The answer is that souls are also made of Aether, and she gives up so much Aether that includes all of her soul as well. By contrast Zodiark was summoned using sacrifices of a lot of people, yes? But he was able to only use their Aether aside from their souls up because Zodiark was really strong and summoned by the Convocation of the Fourteen and so on. Hydaelyn had a much weaker summoning and because of that she didn’t have the option to leave the souls untouched, and that includes Venat she ended up using all of her Aether. In 5.2 there was some discussion of Venat’s group that assisted her in doing this and also how much of the Ancient people were sacrificed to create Zodiark so if you look back at that time it might be of your interest now. At the very end, Hydaelyn still had her own soul, which is Venat’s. That was the very power that she used to fight the Warrior of Light. When she tells you before the final bout she had saved enough Aether specifically to fight you, and that specifically points to Venat’s soul.

The reason the Convocation and the parts of the populace who agreed with them wanted to undertake this sacrifice is known from Hythlodaeus's shade - it is to restore their brethren within Zodiark. Tempering is not alluded to as a factor, and at the end of the day, the tempering only affected the Convocation and is from a primal with no real will of its own when not controlled by Themis, who in turn, as shown by Fandaniel controlling Zodiark, could suppress the souls within him when controlling the primal if needed. So the above is Reddit headcanons on steroids and doesn't line up with what either Hydaelyn herself, her group or Yoshi say about their motives.

Oh and "genocide"?


Doesnt fit, does it?

How does it not? She eliminated them as a species for the very purpose of them becoming abler to directly wield dynamis (the logic of which is itself questionable, and also renders the sundered more susceptible to it.) Before you say it didn't kill anyone - it did. It cut the ancients' lifespans to a fraction of what they once were. This is no different to killing by poison. They also devolved to such a degree that they had to evolve into the sundered races to cope with their much weaker forms, as per Yoshi in the Q&A. Consider that from what we're shown of ancient facilities, they require creation magicks to be operated. They're not going to be very usable to the sundered (who are also much smaller), are they? Nor will they be available to deal with the predators roaming the star. Venat went even further than this in desiring that memory of her people was forgotten. This is a genocide in every single facet. There isn't a credible definition by which this is not a genocide. Yoshi even refers to Emet as being spared from being killed in discussing him, and Hermes's short stories likewise refer to him as being killed by the Sundering (not the EN one, of course.) And in order for her plan to work, which as Yoshi said, can be read as trying to preserve the timeline, it requires yet more genocide. Why? Because that in turn requires the Rejoinings to reach the present day state of affairs. She spared Emet to help enact her plan.

The NieR short story (authored by Ishikawa) gave a taste of what the situation was like after the Sundering, since the game itself neglected to show it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC0U_aTv0EI

Azem / Venat made a hard, horrible, terrible choice..but yes it was necessary.

Don't lump Azem into this. She made a hard, horrible, terrible choice, but the necessity of it is eminently debatable.

Only they were not eradicated, they were Sundered. Not the same thing, also ignoring the fact they were doomed anyway.

Sorry but changing a word here isn't going to make it not a genocide. The claim that they were 'doomed' anyway is similar logic to what Emet-Selch uses regarding the sundered. And it could be true - how many of the dead ends are the sundered subject to, both including ones where supposed 'perfection' is the cause of the end* and affairs such as war or the plague? We've already seen them fall prey to such ends on a micro-scale. How easy would it be for some future antagonist or villain to say "I've glimpsed your future, all paths end in doom, it's time to end it." I have a hunch that if that happens, even if the proposed solution is the totally-not-a-genocide called Sundering, it won't go unopposed and people won't excuse it on the basis of "maybes" in the future - sort of how like with the Rejoinings there was never this humming and hawing about whether they're genocides. They can even have Clive come over from XVI and remind this future not-Venat that "Where there's a chance, there's still a choice" (paraphrasing.)

*Remember, the Nibirun became that way from a state similar to the sundered... funnily enough the tribe quests then go on to show there's hope even for this race of strawmen, who incidentally remind me much more of certain quarters of the 14 fandom than of the ascetic ancients.

I mean... they killed half the population to create Zodiark, then the half of the half to nurture life again, and then they were gonna kill EVERYONE new to bring back the old.

No, not really:




It's only with EW that a third and by all accounts final sacrifice, detailing "a portion of it", of this ambiguous life, somehow becomes interminable sacrifices... and all of this based on a stylised cutscene from Venat's perspective. It's EW canon based off what is little better than headcanon. It doesn't even make sense for the sacrifices to be interminable on another basis: their restored brethren would likewise possess creation magicks. So the notion that they'd run to Zodiark for every little thing, whether informed by Venat about the truth regarding Endsinger or not, is implausible.

Without the first two sacrifices, there is no star. They had tried other methods but none worked (known from JP dialogue from Emet in the Amaurot dungeon) due to the Final Days messing with their creation magicks. A certain someone didn't give them enough information to try another effective solution earlier, so they had to resort to large-scale sacrifice to preserve and revive their star and, later, to retrieve their brethren from the limbo that was being inside Zodiark.

Have to agree on one thing though, this topic has worn thin for me as well.

Hermes apparently didn't receive the amount of mental health care he needed? "Wow their society were a bunch of evil unfeeling fascists who deserved to die".

And at the end of the day, they did try listen to him, but he wasn't described in his short story as being particularly receptive. Judging their society by him alone (where really, it's just a case that his despondent mentality was difficult for the others to grasp viscerally) would be like me judging sundered society on the basis of Ilberd, Amon, Yotsuyu, Zenos etc. and saying "wow these sundered are kind of psychotic/scary and don't grasp mental health concepts, time for them to all die!" GCBTW "empath" logic on the ancients, though.

prior to Thordan's betrayal.

Please don't villainize the dragons for no reason.

Yeah but don't also try ignore the fact that Nidhogg himself had delivered a less than favourable view of the sundered, claiming that they were ill fit as stewards of the star. This is understandable, to an extent, because he was tasked with protecting his kind and we know from EW that other attempts of theirs to settle on other stars were met with very harsh conflict, and it certainly doesn't justify Thordan's killing of Ratatoskr, which still seems to have come down to powerlust, but it's not like Nidhogg conveyed an intent to just co-exist and sing kumbaya. It can readily be interpreted as a threat of future violence. Of course this is where diplomacy should've come in.

[Dikatis]

In so far as we know right now. You really think that the dragons just showed up in Meracydia, and were 100% accepted? The tribes banded together under them after an outside threat showed up at their doorstep. Not before.

In all likelihood, Tiamat and Bahamut settled Meracydia first because of how old they are, just as Vrtra was the first to settle the island of Thavnair before the Arkasodara, Hyur, and Au Ra arrived. We have no particular reason to doubt Tiamat's word on the matter, given that she's in the throes of depression and self-loathing. She has no motive or reason to skew the truth.

Yeah but don't also try ignore the fact that Nidhogg himself had delivered a less than favourable view of the sundered, claiming that they were ill fit as stewards of the star. This is understandable, to an extent, because he was tasked with protecting his kind and we know from EW that other attempts of theirs to settle on other stars were met with very harsh conflict, and it certainly doesn't justify Thordan's killing of Ratatoskr, which still seems to have come down to powerlust, but it's not like Nidhogg conveyed an intent to just co-exist and sing kumbaya. It can readily be interpreted as a threat of future violence. Of course this is where diplomacy should've come in.

I'm not going to deny Nidhogg's pride and animosity toward mankind, I just took offense to Vyrerus' assumption that Tiamat and Bahamut somehow subjugated the people of Meracydia when there's nothing in the story to indicate this.

[Striker44]

Also, no, they weren't going to kill everyone to bring back the old. The wording in never ambiguous about that, it's always "some of the new life created".

This is the genocide part that the anti-Venat cabal loves to conveniently ignore. The simple fact is that a genocide was going to happen no matter what. The only question was whether the victims would be innocent beings created solely to be sacrificed, or the very people who were planning to commit that genocide.

Is it really "killed half the population" when they did it in their own volition?

This also becomes iffy ground depending on how much of the plan individuals and/or the general public knew. It hits different when someone is "sacrificing" themselves expecting it to be the end of their life, versus "sacrificing" themselves...fully expecting to be revived when the plan is complete.

[Lauront]

This is the genocide part that the anti-Venat cabal loves to conveniently ignore. The simple fact is that a genocide was going to happen no matter what. The only question was whether the victims would be innocent beings created solely to be sacrificed, or the very people who were planning to commit that genocide.

No, the "anti-Venat cabal" has discussed this topic extensively. I can refer you to posts on it in this very thread, in case you want to play (?) dumb.

The question of whether it is even a "genocide" depends on whether it is a people being sacrificed or not, a question the writing has never directly answered, but there is an implication that this is life seeded by Zodiark, i.e. living creations given what we know of how life is created in the ancient world. We don't refer to mass slaughter of animals, which we humans (and the sundered in game) habitually perform in the form of modern agricultural and husbandry practices, as genocide. If you're trying to pull some weird argument of this motivating her actions, you will note that she is given a recollection of events by the WoL in Elpis and cannot understand what would move her to the actions she undertook. It is only after Meteion's report that it begins to click for her.

Her stated motivations, and those given by Yoshi, are explicitly 1) ability to manipulate dynamis and 2) not ending up like the world of the Nibirun, hence drop the sacrifices... and "accept suffering". After the shade mentioned this third sacrifice as being what caused her faction's opposition, we were also told by Yoshida that we hadn't heard her faction's side yet. She herself states, freely, that she does not wish to speak ill of the Convocation on this matter and that it does what it deems best for the star's sake, which is dissonant with her performing this on account of some supposed "genocide" - a plan their people were divided on, no less. All life on the star was sundered, whether in agreement with the plan or not, or not even sapient. So if you're trying to frame this as the reason, or claim it's an adequate reason? In the strongest terms: no.

Really, if she's so bothered about genocide, what sense does it make to then deliberately spare Emet, knowing what will happen? It ensures maximum genocide. It's clearly not a cost she's unwilling to bear in order to achieve her goal - a goal (achieved through maintaining the timeline she's told about) which we were told revolves around defeating Endsinger and ensuring the continuity of life... at least, in some form. Your framing of this as some inevitability of genocide, when she had not informed her people of the true nature of her concerns, and this could've meaningfully altered the course of events, doesn't follow.

This also becomes iffy ground depending on how much of the plan individuals and/or the general public knew. It hits different when someone is "sacrificing" themselves expecting it to be the end of their life, versus "sacrificing" themselves...fully expecting to be revived when the plan is complete.

It's clear from Hythlodaeus's words that that is part of the Convocation's plan that was added on later.



For the record: I like her character. What I don't like is the narrative treatment of her actions, or the insinuation that the ancients did not deserve to be told the truth to try and deal with the problem for themselves. I think this actually undermined her writing and it unfortunately involved a lot of awkward backtracking from SHB's themes.

[Vyrerus]

In all likelihood, Tiamat and Bahamut settled Meracydia first because of how old they are

An island is rather different from a continent, for starters, and given that Tiamat and Bahamut aren't as old as mankind as a whole is on Etheirys, it's quite the plot reach to say they were first on an entire continent before any other sentients on a planet they aren't native too. Not too mention they had to grow first before they could start siring their brood.

And it's less about Tiamat lying, and more about, why would a depressed person relating the story about their conquers also talk about some people they displaced when their own tragedy is all consuming in their mind? I don't think many people consumed by tragedy say stuff like, "Oh yeah, I did some complete shit bag things too, before I got trampled."

[DiaDeem]

Is it really "killed half the population" when they did it in their own volition?

Oh no, even if willingly, they were sacrificed, thus got killed. Not saying it wasn't noble or anything but they most def got killed lol.

This, I can agree. The Ancients were flawed and not perfect, what annoys me is that they're judged on completely different standards for their mistakes than the Sundered or our own mankind.
Hermes apparently didn't receive the amount of mental health care he needed? "Wow their society were a bunch of evil unfeeling fascists who deserved to die".
They had to make difficult choices to ensure the star would survive? "Their kind was doomed, it doesn't matter if Venat killed them."
Try to apply the same logic to humans and see how cruel this would be

As someone who'd do anything for her family, I actually relate more with Emet than I do with Venat at a personal level. I feel a lot people are quick to pass judgement without realizing that being on their position wouldn't make the choices as clear cut and simple. I do wish Venat told Emet about the Final Days right away, and wish she brought to a vote if the sundering was a good idea at all. I get that she wanted to introduce pain into the world to prevent their society from becoming apathetic to everything like the Nibium from the Dead Ends, but... she didn't even give them a chance to show they could do better. I'm not entirely sure what the full intent was behind how they painted each character, but how grey they all came across to me is what makes them the best characters in the story. I guess the one thing I would have wanted was for the game to question Venat and her actions a bit more as it did for everyone (ancients) else. I do like them all in their own way, for the record.